Channeling the Electoral College to Reflect More Accurately the Popular Vote

Let's faithfully mirror the will of the people

SummersTimes

Dec 28, 2021

Over the course of the past six presidential elections, Republicans have won the popular vote once:

2000: (D) Gore over Bush

2004: (R) Bush

2008: (D) Obama

2012: (D) Obama

2016: (D) Clinton over Trump

2020: (D) Biden

Might there be methods whereby presidential election outcomes more closely resemble popular votes?

There are several possibilities.

The first would be to elect presidents and vice presidents directly. This would entail outright elimination of the Electoral College by way of constitutional amendment – an exceedingly heavy political lift. There’s indirect precedent, however. Until 1913, U.S Senators were selected by state legislators. The Seventeenth Amendment provides for their popular election. (1)

Another would be to curb use of the winner-take-all premise and instead choose electoral college members by district. “In Nebraska, two (electoral votes) are awarded based on the winner of the statewide popular vote while the other three are allocated to the victor in each congressional district.” (2) On this basis, Trump received four of Nebraska’s electoral votes in 2020; Biden was afforded one.

Another would be to employ ranked choice voting. Maine uses this method. “Ranked-choice voting allows voters to rank all the candidates by preference and for a voter's next choice to be considered if their first candidate doesn't have enough votes to be viable.” (3)

Here’s an example of ranked choice. If three candidates are on the ballot and none has a majority, then an instant runoff occurs. The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and the outcome is recalculated among the top two. However, voters for the third candidate are not disenfranchised: their initial second choice is elevated to their first choice for purposes of the runoff. There’s a majority (and not a plurality) winner every time.

Yet another possibility is proportional voting. Let’s look again at Florida’s 2000 results. (4) Gore received 48.838%% of the popular vote; Bush had 48.847%, which in turn gave him the state’s twenty-five winner-take-all electoral votes. Had proportional voting been used, each man would have had roughly half of Florida’s electors.

A lightly used provision of the Constitution permits states to enter into agreements among themselves (i.e., interstate compacts.) (5) This is the genesis for a rather intriguing approach: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. “(NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome. (Citations omitted.) As of June 2021, it has been adopted by fifteen states and the District of Columbia. These states have 195 electoral votes, which is 36% of the Electoral College and 72% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.” (6)